Many retailers and other entities store inventory within warehouses. For example, a retailer stores inventory within hundreds of warehouses that are used to supply such inventory to thousands of brick and mortar stores, to outlets, to wholesalers, for ecommerce order fulfillment, and/or other local or global channels. An inventory allocator is employed by the retailer to track and manage the flow of inventory, such as into warehouses, from warehouses to stores, from warehouses and stores to consumers, etc. The retailers usually specify a default supply chain of warehouses for a set of stores, such that the set of stores is always sourced from the same warehouses.
Some systems allow the default supply chain to be bypassed so that inventory can be arbitrarily sourced from any warehouse that has available units of the required items. Unfortunately, fulfilling item requests from any warehouse without further considerations results in inefficient sourcing of inventory. For example, it is inefficient for a retail store in Texas to pull inventory from a warehouse in Toronto, even though the Toronto warehouse has adequate inventory, because of cost, time, and import/export implications. Thus, arbitrarily selecting any warehouse with available inventory does not scale well for large retail implementations, such as where items are sold in multiple countries, through different business entities/brands/banners (e.g., a retailer sells adult clothing through a first retail brand, children's clothing through a third retail brand, etc.), and through multiple channels such as wholesalers, retail stores, ecommerce, franchises, etc.
The inventory allocator could often lack awareness of the implication of selecting inventory from different business entities and channels of the retailer. Inefficient sourcing of inventory leads to inventory imbalances across stores and channels, which leads to an increase of product markdown and disappointed customers. It also leads to increased cost, time to fulfill item requests, and potential import/export implications.
Without the ability to identify efficient warehouses for sourcing inventory, a retailer is left to manually evaluate large numbers of warehouses from which to source inventory. Processing and storage resources are wasted in creating hundreds of warehouse sourcing options for the retailer to manually consider. For example, there may be hundreds of warehouses or combinations of warehouses that have available inventory for satisfying an item request. Such resources are wasted on creating warehouse sourcing options that will not be used because the retailer will only select a single warehouse or a single sequence of warehouses if the single warehouse does not have enough inventory to satisfy an item request.